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You may have heard of BareFeats, right? You know, the mad scientists types that agonize over clock frequencies, fill rates and hardware stats so you don’t have to. They’re out with a comprehensive gaming shootout pitting the latest iMac family against Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros and current-gen Mac Pros. They specifically focused on graphics performance in games by measuring Portal 2 frame rates at various quality settings and resolutions. Their take?

The new 2011 iMacs run latest games very well despite their mobile AMD graphics being actually slower than Nvidia’s flagship mobile chip. The 2011 iMac family is a “best buy” for gamers, the site concluded. Read on for additional explanation and another chart proving their point.

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On overall, BareFeats argues, the flagship current-gen 27-inch iMac runs Portal 2 less than a third slower (28 percent) compared to the top-of-the-line six-core Mac Pro equipped with the AMD Radeon HD 5870 graphics. However, the Mac Pro system is seventy percent pricier than its iMac counterpart. This means that iMacs offer the best value/performance ration for gamers than any other Mac system. Moreover, they noted, “you don’t even need the Core i7 version of the 2011 iMac to run games well” because the 3.1GHz Core i5 iMac packs in the same AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics as the 3.4GHz Core i7 model.

On the other hand, if you already own a Mac Pro, for a $449 (or a fraction of the cost of an iMac) you can supercharge your gaming machine.

Hit the source link for comprehensive benchmark results and more pretty charts.